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"Straight up: This is hell. Getting locked up in Haiti will drive you crazy if it doesn't kill you first," homicide suspect Vangeliste Bazile tells the AP from Haiti's National Penitentiary. The crumbling facility houses around 5,000 prisoners, 80% of which are in extended pretrial detention. Overcrowding, malnutrition, and infectious diseases that flourish in jammed quarters have led to an upsurge of inmate deaths in Haiti, including 21 at the Port-au-Prince penitentiary just last month. Those who monitor the country's lockups are sounding an alarm about collapsing conditions. "This is the worst rate of preventable deaths that I have encountered anywhere in the world," says Dr. John May, co-founder of the Health Through Walls nonprofit.

Some inmates are provided meals by visiting relatives, but the large majority of prisoners are dependent on authorities to feed them twice a day and get little more than rationed supplies of rice, oats, or cornmeal. Even clean drinking water is often in short supply. Prison authorities say they try their best to meet inmates' needs, but receive insufficient funds from the state to buy food and cooking fuel. Haiti's penal system is by far the globe's most congested, with a staggering 454% occupancy level, according to the University of London's Institute for Criminal Policy Research. The nonprofit Institute for Justice and Democracy blames the overcrowding on rampant corruption, with judges, prosecutors, and lawyers creating a market for bribes. (Read more Haiti stories.)

Clinton Foundation is the problem here. There are a few honest brothers in Haiti that attempted to work with the Clinton's RICCO operation, unbeknownst to the honest Haitians, but were told to pay to play.. Thank God Hillary Terrorist Psycho and Bill's pimp is not still parked in the WH.! Go Trump!

Boz O'Clown

Feb 20, 2017 4:26 PM CST

I smell a new Hollywood movie: Escape From Haiti (Insert Pat Benatar's Hell is for Children here) It's the year 2017. Trump buys Haiti and turns it into a for-profit prison island. Seriously, Haiti is an armpit. If America is about "saving the world" instead of selling weapons, we could make better use of part of the $40B+ we spend each year on war.

GypsyJean

Feb 20, 2017 12:22 PM CST

When we spent a lot of time in Venezuela in the 90s, we were told that people were thrown in jail there for things as minor as a fender bender with nosebleed (any blood, and both drivers go to jail to sort things out). Because it was pretrial detention, not prison, the officials had no obligation to feed the prisoners. Our friend's brother, a taxi driver, was in jail for just that problem - a minor accident with another car. His sister and wife went to the jail every day to bring him food, and also food for everyone else in that jail cell to be sure he wasn't murdered for his food. That's barbaric. I don't want to live where our "public servants" are that unfeeling and barbaric.